Solo Organ
In May 2014 Hannah Marsshall, Jon Rose and I were given support to do The Tuning Out Tour. As part of the project I had to locate tracker action organs reasonably evenly distributed all over England. Most of this was done online and then followed up by telephone. I finally arranged to visit 25 churches in England in order to schedule a tour for the trio. .
In many churches in England there are organs of all shapes and sizes....they go with the Service and are a big part of the Christian ceremony and have been for hundreds of years. Given that the organ for this project was playing with cello and violin I was more interested in finding smaller organs.
The earliest organs were completely mechanical and these are the ones I was interested in....these are called tracker action organs. When each stop is very carefully and slowly pulled out while a key is pressed, a myriad of uncertain transitional stages of sound is produced....at first you get just the breath, then a glimmer of sound, often in a different pitch to the final key pitch...this different pitch can be a microtone away from the final pitch or can be some kind of harmonically related partial to the final pitch....and if the stop is further pulled, the volume increases before getting to its final full 'stop-out' destination.
So with different manuals (more than one keyboard) you can start to relate chords like this on one manual to chords like that on another, with stops that relate to only one of the keyboards....the resulting chords are sonically rich and uncertain and changeable depending on the minutest push or pull of a stop in transition.
Nearly all the churches that were visited had very special instruments....all very different, and because of this, making the decision for chosing the churches for the Tuning Out Tour was more about timing and geography than the quality of the organ.
However, in the initial research visiting all the churches, I got to play at least 20 very good instruments and recorded them. The following are images of these instruments.
In May 2014 Hannah Marsshall, Jon Rose and I were given support to do The Tuning Out Tour. As part of the project I had to locate tracker action organs reasonably evenly distributed all over England. Most of this was done online and then followed up by telephone. I finally arranged to visit 25 churches in England in order to schedule a tour for the trio. .
In many churches in England there are organs of all shapes and sizes....they go with the Service and are a big part of the Christian ceremony and have been for hundreds of years. Given that the organ for this project was playing with cello and violin I was more interested in finding smaller organs.
The earliest organs were completely mechanical and these are the ones I was interested in....these are called tracker action organs. When each stop is very carefully and slowly pulled out while a key is pressed, a myriad of uncertain transitional stages of sound is produced....at first you get just the breath, then a glimmer of sound, often in a different pitch to the final key pitch...this different pitch can be a microtone away from the final pitch or can be some kind of harmonically related partial to the final pitch....and if the stop is further pulled, the volume increases before getting to its final full 'stop-out' destination.
So with different manuals (more than one keyboard) you can start to relate chords like this on one manual to chords like that on another, with stops that relate to only one of the keyboards....the resulting chords are sonically rich and uncertain and changeable depending on the minutest push or pull of a stop in transition.
Nearly all the churches that were visited had very special instruments....all very different, and because of this, making the decision for chosing the churches for the Tuning Out Tour was more about timing and geography than the quality of the organ.
However, in the initial research visiting all the churches, I got to play at least 20 very good instruments and recorded them. The following are images of these instruments.